Armenian symbolist Mouradian stretches the boundaries of reality to the breaking point! His gloriously surreal canvases are bursting with color and activity. Gifted with the technical proficiency of Daniel Merriam or Michael Parkes, and armed with a hallucinogenic imagination, Mouradian is a universe unto himself. Swarthy gypsies battle flying fish while Rubenesque ladies balance atop dachshunds, and that's just the first page! This is fine art and humour combined into one persons imagination, this is a showcase of madness but with a touch of happy humour.

An American citizen was framed by a former British spy and a Russian citizen with the financial support of the United States Government, the DNC, and the Hillary Clinton Campaign. All Americans should be aware this event happened.

Mouradian, who is not identified, begins before the dawn of civilization to trace the quest for product quality to the present, project it into the 21st century. He often delves into the techniques, strategies, principles, and philosophies used through the centuries, but assumes no technical background. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Elie Wiesel called the genocide of the Armenians during the First World War ‘the Holocaust before the Holocaust’. Around one and a half million Armenians - men, women and children – were slaughtered at the time of the First World War. This book outlines some of the historical facts and consequences of the massacres but sees it as its main objective to present the Armenians to the foreign reader, their history but also their lives and achievements in the present that finds most Armenians dispersed throughout the world. 3000 years after their appearance in history, 1700 years after adopting Christianity and almost 90 years after the greatest catastrophe in their history, these 50 ‘biographical sketches of intellectuals, artists, journalists, and others...produce a complicated kaleidoscope of a divided but lively people that is trying once again, to rediscover its ethnic coherence. Armenian civilization does not consist solely of stories about a far-off past, but also of traditions and a national conscience suggestive of a future that will transcend the present.’ [from the Preface]

The Hermitage Effect tells the tale of how Bill Browder went from being Putin's biggest cheerleader to Browder claiming he was Vladimir Putin's number one enemy. This book examines Sergei Magnitsky's police testimonies and speculates if the real whistleblower to the biggest tax heist in Russia was a seventy year old Russian woman named Rimma Starova.

In the early part of the twentieth century, as Europe began its descent into the First World War, the Ottoman world – once the largest Empire in the Middle East – began to experience a revolution which would culminate in the new, secular Turkish state. Alongside this, in 1915, as part of an increasing nationalism, it enacted a genocide against its Armenian citizens. In this new study, Hans-Lukas Kieser marshals a dazzling array of scholars to re-evaluate the approach and legacy of the Young Turks – whose eradication of the Armenians from Asia Minor would have far-reaching consequences. Kieser argues that genocide led to today's crisis-ridden Middle East and set in place a rigid state system whose effects are still felt in Turkey today.Featuring new and groundbreaking work on the role of bureaucracy, the actors outside of Istanbul and re-centreing Armenian agency in the genocide, The End of the Ottomans is a vital new study of the Ottoman world, the Armenian Genocide and of the Middle East.

How nations can promote peace, prosperity, and stability through cohesive political institutions "Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." So wrote Adam Smith a quarter of a millennium ago. Using the tools of modern political economics and combining economic theory with a bird's-eye view of the data, this book reinterprets Smith's pillars of prosperity to explain the existence of development clusters—places that tend to combine effective state institutions, the absence of political violence, and high per-capita incomes. To achieve peace, the authors stress the avoidance of repressive government and civil conflict. Easy taxes, they argue, refers not to low taxes, but a tax system with widespread compliance that collects taxes at a reasonable cost from a broad base, like income. And a tolerable administration of justice is about legal infrastructure that can support the enforcement of contracts and property rights in line with the rule of law. The authors show that countries tend to enjoy all three pillars of prosperity when they have evolved cohesive political institutions that promote common interests, guaranteeing the provision of public goods. In line with much historical research, international conflict has also been an important force behind effective states by fostering common interests. The absence of common interests and/or cohesive political institutions can explain the existence of very different development clusters in fragile states that are plagued by poverty, violence, and weak state capacity.

Researching through volumes in several libraries and archives in the United States, author Kay Mouradian visited the village in Turkey where her mother and her mothers family, along with twenty-five thousand other Armenians, were forced to leave their homes. Traveling over the same deportation route to the deserts of Syria where more than a million Armenians perished, the author became acutely aware of the suffering of her mothers generation and the lingering sense of injustice they carried. Like the 6 million Jewish people lost in the Holocaust, Armenians lost an incredibly vibrant, successful, and valuable gene pool of more than a million as a result of the Armenian genocide. This story of fourteen-year-old Flora Munushian, the authors mother, brings an epic chapter in Armenian history to life and takes it to heart. Floras incredible story honors her people with dignity and personifies the human spirit of hope, love, and justice. Floras voice is that of all the victims and survivors of the Armenian Genocide, a story that must not be forgotten. I am my mothers voice, says Dr. Mouradian, and this is her story.

As the First World War seeps into the psyche of the world, Armenians in the Ottoman Empire have only one goal: to survive. But in a part of the world that has its sights set on destroying every single one of them, the cost of doing so is unimaginably high. Ana Mouradian didn't truly grasp this concept until an attack on her village tore her away from her small-town life, resulting in a loss so great, it leaves her changed forever. Forced to become accustomed to a life on the run, she soon learns more about herself and her past than she could ever bear to live with.As for Andre Abrahamian, he knows exactly how much sacrifice it takes to stay alive in a world that wants to kill him; he would be dead if he didn't. In hiding with his large family and safe for the time being, he now struggles to cope with the payment that he is forced to make every day, even now that the threat of death is long gone. When they unexpectedly meet in a cave etched into the side of a mountain, Ana and Andre are fighting for more than just their lives. Both scapegoats of conflicts larger than man, they are drawn to each other, and soon discover that together, they have the potential to live a life free from debt. To achieve this, however, they must be willing to hand over to one another the last part of their lives that belong to themselves.